Care to share the science? This sounds more like a learner's internal/external locus of control. If you believe you are capable of figuring something out you're probably right and likewise if you believe you can't.
I'd recommend rereading my post. The problem with education research is that there's a hundred years of it. I listed the two in my original post. A longer list:
- Bruner's work on spiral curriculum, and follow-up work. Spiral curricula are mis-implemented in most schools which claim to use them; it's not review. It's successive passes going deeper.
- Cognitive work on progressions such as surface->deep->transfer learning (Hattie) or chunking
- Physics education research on complex multiconcept problems
- Spacing effect. You can go all the way back to 1885 with Ebinghaus, but the esoteric author of supermemo seems to have done the best work here. If you prefer the academic establishment, there's a ton.
- There's a bunch of science that about 2/3s of what we learn, we're not aware we're learning or teaching. Concepts support each other, deeply. Kaplan, back when Bror was there, did a bunch of nice work there. It's easier to learn long division if you know a bit of algebra, and vice-versa. Chemistry helps learn physics, and physics helps learn chemistry. This was supported with pretty independent methodologies in independent domains (data analysis from tests, cognitive task analysis, etc.).
... and so on. This has very little to do with affect. It's a very well-established, rarely-applied set of results.
A complete lit review here would be book-length, at least.
